The following discussion sets forth the inventors' own knowledge of certain technologies and/or problems associated therewith. Accordingly, this discussion is not an admission of prior art, and it is not an admission of the knowledge available to a person of ordinary skill in the art.
The telecommunication industry continues to grow rapidly, but is becoming increasingly competitive. Most telecommunication companies rely upon a direct sales business model in which the provider advertises and markets telecommunication products directly to end users. Some providers target enterprise customers for bulk purchases of services for enterprise use, but the enterprise and its employees are still the end user of the services. This business model generally requires expensive advertising campaigns and costly employment of direct sales professionals.
A hierarchical resale model may be advantageous. A hierarchical resale system may be organized into levels of resellers and each reseller may wish to appear to be an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or service provider, and may wish to avoid the appearance of dependence upon any higher level provider. A portal application may facilitate implementation of the hierarchical resale system. The portal may be rebranded by each level of the hierarchy. The portal may provide a variety of functions to providers and the provider's customers. Some functions may be automated, and may be responsive to certain events. One problem with this system is that the automated responses to events, such as emails, SNTP traps, or SIP notification events may originate from the top level provider's server or domain. The domain may be masked, but often, the masked domain will not resolve properly on incoming servers. The incoming servers may reject the event responses because of domain resolution problems.